Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain by Tom Watson

should demonstrate the scale of GM’s activities … so they would feature victims from different areas of public life, politics, showbiz, etc
     
In terms of NoW :
     
(a) They suggested [this part of the email is unclear] News of the World journalists directly accessing the voicemails (this is what did for Clive).
     
(b) But they have got hold of NoW back numbers to 2004 and are trying to marry CG accesses to specific stories,
     
(c) In one case they seem to have a phrase from an NoW story which is identical to the tape or note of GM’s access,
     
(d) They have no recordings of NoW people speaking to GM or accessing voicemails,
     
(e) They do have GM’s phone records which show sequences of contacts with News of the World before and after accesses … obviously they don’t have the content of the calls … so this is at best circumstantial.
     
10. They are going to contact RW today to see if she wishes to take it further. 11
     
     
    Unsurprisingly, Wade did not wish to submit a formal complaint against her employers. Scotland Yard showed a similar lack of enthusiasm for widening Operation Caryatid. At the time, the Met was engaged in seventy live operations, some of which were not being fully staffed for lack of resources. At the end of September, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, Andy Hayman’s deputy, made the decision to limit the investigation to Goodman and Mulcaire. Speaking six years later at the Leveson Inquiry, he stood by his decision:
     
Invasions of privacy are odious, obviously. They can be extraordinarily distressing and at times they can be illegal, but, to put it bluntly, they don’t kill you. Terrorists do. 12
     
     
    He expressed disappointment, however, at the execution of the police’s strategy to inform victims. Officers told thirty-six individuals in the government, military, police and royal household who they deemed needed to know their phones had been compromised for reasons of national security. Strangely, these did not include John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, who was known to have been distrustful of Rupert Murdoch’s political meddling.
    Police later said that they understood that the mobile phone companies would alert affected customers. O2 warned forty straight away; the others waited for a staggering five years. Citing a concern that doing so would prejudice police inquiries, Orange and T-Mobile only notified their forty-five and seventy-one subscribers respectively in July 2011, while Vodafone waited until January 2012 to contact its forty affected customers. This meant that until then all those individuals were unaware they could change their PIN codes or sue News International. The overwhelming majority of Mulcaire’s victims did not find out for years that they had been targeted.
    Police had found a thoroughly detailed haul of incriminating evidence indicating that Mulcaire had hacked hundreds of newsworthy targets. But they had misled prosecutors about the number of victims and the involvement of other NoW journalists, failed to inform directly the vast majority of people who were likely to have been eavesdropped on, and rejected the options of selecting a wider sample of wrongdoing, pursuing a limited number of heavy users of Mulcaire at the News of the World or farming out the investigation to a less stretched unit . So the prosecution would be very narrow indeed.
    This was a relief to the obstructive authorities at Wapping. Journalists there had been expecting the police to be knocking on their doors early in the morning, but the knocks never came. Faced with the ongoing threat to their reputations from the continuing, albeit limited, fallout from Goodman and Mulcaire’s arrests, Rupert Murdoch’s executives considered how best to respond to the steadily escalating crisis. They then did what they thought was proper in the circumstances: for the next five years they mounted a sustained and deliberate cover-up, threatened, followed and attacked their